Contemporary cooking appliances may include separate indicator lights for indicating that the cooktop is ON and another indicating that the cooktop is hot. To illuminate the cooktop hot light, the cooking appliance may include a set of thermally expanding contacts on each individual element and these contacts expand to close when the element is hot, completing the circuit, and open when the element is cool, opening the circuit. Such a method for illuminating the lights may be unreliable as over time the thermal expansion of the contacts may vary and can cause the light to be on for extended periods of time or even permanently. Some contemporary cooking appliances use a separate control board to indicate to the consumer that the cooktop is hot, but these are appliances in which expensive microcontrollers rather than less expensive rotary switches are used.